Talk:How to Create a Mind

How to Create a Mind received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

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Not really covered

I only used selected parts of the book for the contents section. I believe the goal of the contents section is to relay the general flavor and ideas of the book, not to chronical them in detail. However if people want to add more, that is possible. Here are the chapters from the book I used lightly or not at all:

Introduction
6. Transcendent Abilities
8. The Mind as Computer
~~9. Thought Experiments on the Mind~~
11. Objections

I did add Chapter 9 as the Philosophy section. Silas Ropac (talk) 20:21, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Other reviews/critics?

I went with the most mainstream reviews to establish notability. It would be nice to include some more technical reviews from perhaps less known sources, like blogs, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Silas Ropac (talk • contribs) 17:16, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Harv template

Hi, as an example of using the template I've added the book reference with "cite book" replaced by "citation" and used the Template:Harvard citation no brackets for one of the harvard style reference inline citations.[1] The advantage is that it makes a link down to the reference, which becomes very useful when you've got a lot of references. The other inline citations could be converted in the same way, or if you prefer to keep it as it was, simply undo my changes. Thanks for your work on this, dave souza, talk 06:07, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

p.s. http://toolserver.org/~holek/cite-gen/ gives this templated reference when the ISBN number is added. . dave souza, talk 06:13, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I see the advantages of this style for articles with lots of references, so it is good to know about. For this article I'm not sure it matters. But if I were to keep it I'm wondering do I then break it into Citations and References? And for all the web references would those use this style also, or it probably doesn't make sense because each of them is only a single citation. Silas Ropac (talk) 13:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Okay I did use harvnb for all the book citations, and I split it into Citations and References sections. Does look neater, thanks. Not sure about the newspaper/web references if those can be similarly split up. I did just one footnote per newspaper/web reference partly because there really aren't page numbers, so you can't easily cite within the articles. Silas Ropac (talk) 14:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's ok, in larger articles it's usually easier for readers to go straight to newspaper or web references as you've done. Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners gives a pretty good overview, including the "Same reference used more than once" trick to avoid repetition. A minor point, usually the first section is titled "Notes" rather than "Citations", I wasn't sure why but find that WP:FNNR says "Citations" may be used but is problematic because it may be confused with official awards. As often happens, there are multiple options but usually best to stick to a simple way and ignore the others! . . . .dave souza, talk 09:03, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks I changed it to Notes, I think that looks/read better. Maybe why it is commonly used. Silas Ropac (talk) 11:23, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I switched {{harvnb}} over to {{sfn}} because it doesn't require <ref>...</ref> tags and it consolidates notes with duplicate page numbers, but otherwise looks identical. So it is seems better all around. Silas Ropac (talk) 14:32, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How to improve this article

Article was assessed on 8 February 2013 by INeverCry and given a Start class rating.

Here are some comments copied (with permission) from INeverCry's talk page, about what could be done to improve this article:

I would first suggest you use Wikipedia:BOOKS#Article_structure as a guideline, especially when it comes to organizing the material you already have. A better lead is needed. A section giving background info would probably be a good idea - maybe something detailing his studies, influences, other books he's written that're related, main ideas, etc. A topic like "PRTM" might even be better as a sub-section or independent section. What you have as "Reception" could be seperated into "Reception" and "Analysis" sections, dividing the reactions to the book and how it's written from comments on and criticism of the author's ideas and theories themselves. As for the content section, I would recommend making it cover the book as evenly as possible, so that a reader feels they're getting a general overview of the book. I would also get rid of the sentence "Reception of this book has been mixed." Anyways, the article could be rated C as it is, but I tend to rate things pretty conservatively. INeverCry 04:59, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So there are some good ideas in there. Silas Ropac (talk) 01:01, 10 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is the article when it was just rated start Silas Ropac (talk) 02:11, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I addressed most (all?) of these issues: new lead, new background section, doubled the content section and added subsections, split analysis out from reception. And the article was re-assessed as C! As for what remains wrong: he said the lead is not good. It is more like background on the author than summary of the whole article. Silas Ropac (talk) 20:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So for the record this is the article when it was rated C — Preceding unsigned comment added by Silas Ropac (talk • contribs) 21:41, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Okay I rewrote the lead, I think it is much better. So not sure what is next to work on here. Some more review or sources would be nice, but I have not seen any. Maybe if Kurzweil's work at Google uses any of these ideas, there will be more talk about the book. Silas Ropac (talk) 00:42, 18 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

With new lead article is a B. Not obvious what to fix next, so requesting peer review. Silas Ropac (talk) 12:21, 18 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

McGinn review

McGinn, Colin. Homunculism The New York Review of Books 2013-03-21.

I will take a crack at adding this to the Analysis section. But if someone else is interested in doing it, please post and here and then go for it, I'm happy to have the help. Silas Ropac (talk) 16:37, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've added McGinn although perhaps it could be expanded or refined. Silas Ropac (talk) 01:09, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]